Data scientists in hot demand in ICT market

Data scientists – described as having “The sexiest job of the 21st century” – are reportedly in high demand, particularly those who freelance, in Australia and around the world.

According to the latest survey of the tech jobs market by Australian-based freelancing and crowdsourcing employment marketplace, Freelancer.com, mobile is a core focus for businesses with Android taking the lead over Apple; social media monetisation is evolving towards video content and eCommerce, and eCommerce on the whole is surging, with data science being recognised as a core capability for businesses that want to grow.

Freelancer.com CEO Matt Barrie says the effect of Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’, and social monetisation on the online world, can be seen in the company’s latest quarterly Fast50, with data science becoming ubiquitous among tech and traditional organisations alike.

Barrie says Google’s ‘Mobilegeddon’ and wearable applications is driving strong mobile development growth across the market.

Barrie cites the fact that on 21 April this year, Google rolled out its mobile-friendly update – dubbed ‘Mobilegeddon’ – “a significant change to Google’s algorithm”.

“Simply put, businesses that did not have mobile-friendly websites lost search traffic and did not show in mobile search results. This sent many companies into a frenzy of fixing their websites to ensure they showed up in Google’s mobile search results.

“In reaction to these changes, we have seen strong growth in mobile phone related jobs posted this quarter (up 25.6% to 22,290 jobs).

According to Barrie, Google’s increasing emphasis on mobile web also led to a surge in native app adoption and engagement, as it is common practice for mobile websites to encourage the viewer to download an app for a superior experience.

“This, along with the gathering market for wearables, has seen substantial jobs growth across both the iOS and Android ecosystems. In Q1, 2015, Android had more jobs than Apple but Apple jobs were growing more quickly. This quarter, Android leapt ahead with its number of jobs and growth (up 24.2% to 18,431 jobs). Apple iOS, including iPad apps and the newly-released Apple Watch, fell behind but still grew nicely quarter-by-quarter (up 16.4% to 17,378 jobs).

This latest report by freelancer for Q2 2015 looked at the ICT employment market and concluded:

• Social Media evolves into Social Commerce

The relentless drive towards monetisation of social media is starting to hit a wall, forcing an evolution towards social commerce. Advertisers are fed up with bait-and-switch tactics like the organic reach debacle, and it shows, with Facebook Advertising declining for yet another quarter (down 11.9% to 7,459 jobs).

In the light of this, Facebook are looking towards other methods of monetisation, including a recent announcement that they are moving towards a YouTube-like revenue share model to stimulate more native video sharing.

Facebook are recognising that video is the content distribution medium of the future, and it reflects in this quarter’s Fast 50, with both Video Services (up 22.8% to 3,634 jobs) and Videography (up 18.5% to 1,122 jobs) growing strongly.

Meanwhile, companies were focusing a lot more efforts on Twitter this past quarter (up 21.9% to 4,597 jobs), and the visual media powerhouse Pinterest continued its stellar growth (up 22.0% to 2,126 jobs). The momentum Pinterest have built is showing no signs of slowing down. Their newly launched buyable pins (trialling in the United States) added an eCommerce element to their platform.

This evolution towards social commerce as a monetisation model is leading the way forward for other social networks. Social commerce sales are expected to represent 5% of US online retail revenue in 2015 and the effects are becoming more and more evident.

• eCommerce

eCommerce as a whole is surging (up 14.7% to 9,128 jobs), with the standout performer being WooCommerce.

A popular WordPress eCommerce solution, WooCommerce is inherently mobile friendly, and in light of Q2’s ‘Mobilegeddon’, WooCommerce jobs have skyrocketed (up 750% to 1,097 jobs). Shopify implementations also grew very strongly (up 31.4% to 732 jobs). We expect more and more companies implementing these responsive technologies to optimise their user experience, improve customer satisfaction, and increase site traffic and conversion rates – ultimately boosting online sales.

• Rise of the Data Scientists

HBR has declared the Data Scientist to be “The sexiest job of the 21st century”. They make sense of oceans of structured and unstructured data, and suggest actions and strategies to help optimise and grow businesses. These are highly-qualified people with the strength and patience to tunnel through mountains of information with algorithms in search of gold within. Modern businesses are scrambling to hire them into their organisations.

Many data science jobs seen posted on Freelancer included Data Warehousing, Big Data, Scraping, Data Mining, Data Processing, Excel, Machine Learning, and Data Entry. These are all essential for data-rich businesses to survive and thrive in the modern world.

Data Scientists spend a great deal of time preparing data and they have turned to Freelancer.com for help with this time consuming task. As a result, Data Entry (up 47.3% to 23,242 jobs), Excel (up 61.2% to 19,948 jobs), and Data Processing (up 67.4% to 13,179 jobs) all displayed rapid growth.